For all the hype about Wikis and social software revolutionizing the enterprise, the evidence shows that enterprises either aren’t aware of these tools, or aren’t deploying them.

Nemertes Research has interviewed over 75 enterprises for our upcoming benchmark “Building a Successful Virtual Workplace.” As part of the interview process we’re asking enterprise IT executives about their adoption of, and strategy for social software such as blogs, wikis, RSS, and shared workspaces. The results thus far have been surprising.

Less than 30% of enterprises are using wikis, less than 15% have deployed RSS services or internal blogging systems. In most cases, usage of these tools is within small workgroups rather than the enterprise as a whole, with reliance on public services or shareware applications brought in by individual users or workgroups. Often the quote we’ve heard is “well, we use a wiki here in IT, or XXX department is trying one, but we don’t have an “enterprise wiki platform.””

The one area where we do see a significantly high rate of adoption or planned adoption is in shared workspace collaboration applications, with the majority of enterprises we’ve interviewed using or planning to use Microsoft’s SharePoint or IBM Lotus’s Team Workplace.